Available Light

Jeanne Braham

145 pp.

6 × 9, Gatefold paperback with photographs

978-0-87233-206-5

November 2015

$23.95

Philip Booth published ten volumes of meticulously crafted lyric poems in his lifetime, most of them set in and inscribed by the landscapes and cadences of Down East Maine. Like other major poets writing from New England who were his contemporaries, the echoes of Robert Frost register in Booth’s structure and language. Booth knew Frost personally and if his mentor’s poetic example shaped Booth’s art, Castine, Maine, home of Booth’s maternal ancestors for five generations, provided “the gift of place”: the historic, geographic, and experiential canvas on which to paint his poems. This biography aims to ignite new interest in a poet who spent a “lifetime looking into how words see.”

Jeanne Braham is author of five books on American arts and letters, she has taught literature and creative writing at a number of colleges and universities including Allegheny College, Smith College, Hampshire College, the University of New Hampshire, and Clark University. She is the founding editor of Heatherstone Press, a fine arts publisher of poetry chapbooks. Braham lives in western Massachusetts.